The savage descent of Mustang Sallie

Wollongong woman Rachel Parker hasn't seen her older sister, Sallie Belling, since 1999. They met in a Sydney cafe and Sallie asked for $40. Rachel couldn't bring herself to give it to her. Anthony Belling hasn't seen his mother for even longer – since soon after he burnt the flat down. It was 1994 and he was a toddler. He doesn't remember playing with the lighter someone had left lying around, or the fire. He doesn't remember his mother.

Now, it's December 2015 and Anthony and his Aunt Rachel are sitting in the front row of a chapel, looking at a box holding his mother's corpse. A pianist starts to play – Cyndi Lauper's True Colors. Rachel is bewildered in black; her face crumples in distress. Anthony leans his head into his aunt's shoulder.

His mother liked to be called "Mustang Sallie". When the piano stops, the 1965 R&B song – about a wild girl hooning around town in her Ford Mustang – blasts. Anthony's mother also liked knitting and the colour purple. She liked crime, sci-fi and a good murder story, but not that soppy romance stuff. She liked her eight cats and her crippled old dog Toby. She liked heroin.

Sal was more Kings Cross than the El Alamein fountain, Wayside Chapel pastor Graham Long tells his congregation. "You loved her and she loved you." Then, in the manner of funerals at Wayside, a parade of characters stands up to offer their two bobs' worth.

Read more: ‘It's like Maurie Crocker looking down on us’

"Taz", a tall biker with a neat beard and black waistcoat, says he and Sallie were an item in the Cross in the early '90s when she was "a little redhead, a foxy little piece". He remembers her honesty. Someone in a black leather jacket gets up. You'll know me as "Grub" or "Roy", the man says, then talks about a car show he saw on the television. They were restoring a rusted Ford Mustang Boss. He wishes, he says, that Sal could have been fixed up like that.

A man with the lank long hair and lugubrious cast of Neil from The Young Ones stands. It's Dave. Sallie used to say that he was her "street brother, closer than blood". Dave found his street sister dead on her bed in her inner-city public housing flat a month back. It's taken this long to find Sallie's son and sister. Dave is a mess. When things in his life turned to shit, he says, Sallie was always there to pick up the pieces.

A lady called Joan takes the microphone. She met Sallie, an addict, prostitute and then rough-sleeper, in the '90s at St Johns Church in inner-Sydney's Darlinghurst. Sallie called the volunteer "Mum". A few months ago, they crossed paths at the church's community centre and Sallie proudly told Joan that her son was at university.

"Well, that's a load of shit." Anthony Belling's brain is snapping. He doesn't go to university. He works at a fish and chip shop in Crookwell in the NSW Southern Tablelands, where he lives with his step-grandfather, Colin. He hasn't been in contact with his mother since he was 11.

When he was a teenager, Anthony, now 25, attacked the only photograph he had of her with a stapler. Later, when it was gone, he realised he couldn't even remember what she looked like. "Oh well," he thought. He vaguely remembers an excursion with her on a train. He still has the stuffed toy raccoon she gave him. And now he will have the dissonant memory of her funeral.

Next to him, Rachel is starting to think that the woman everyone is talking about isn't the same one she knows. She's thinking that something weird is happening at her sister's funeral.

Wednesday, September 9, 2015, Cafe Bella Vita, Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross: She has a geriatric's sunken cheekbones and gummy mouth. A drug-f...ed mouth, a junkie's mouth. Mushing up steak and mashed potatoes. Ignores the salad. Wants to throw up. Wants more sugar for her tea. Wants cigarettes. Wants to get stoned. Dave pulls up, leans down, mutters in her ear. She gives him $50. Dealer's waiting.

"WHEN IT FAILS, get your affairs in order." That's what doctors have told Sallie Belling about the catheter through which her blood runs during her thrice-weekly appointments with a dialysis machine. She yanks her T-shirt down to reveal a droopy, tattooed chest and, with grimy fingers, scratches at the spot where a permacath enters her 46-year-old flesh.

In mid-2015, gravely ill, she agreed to share the story of her life, death and funeral with Good Weekend, knowing she would never read the article. I envisaged it would be something sad but straightforward; the story of one life that might have the power to illuminate the sense, if not the specifics, of any number of other difficult, dispossessed lives. But things are rarely straightforward.

Sallie Belling tells me a story. She's gruff, there are frequent long silences and, when that jackhammer pain pounds her spine, she stops for longer and sways a little in her seat, releasing an odour of sweat and animals, dirt and urine. She says she was one of 13 kids. Her mother, Kerry, and father, John, were living near Orange when Kerry started relations with Colin, a neighbour. "Dad was left high and dry." Her new stepfather was "not a very nice person".

Sallie says she was seven when her stepfather first started touching her. In 1981 when she was 12, she gave birth to her stepfather's child. They took her baby, a boy she called Phillip, and put him up for adoption. Soon after, she was sent to boarding school in Bathurst; her stepfather's mother, hoping to keep her quiet, paid the fees. Her sisters, she says, were also abused. Her mother refused to believe it. "If one daughter comes to you and says something's happening, maybe she's lying. If seven daughters come through and say something's happening, something's happening."

Sallie's sister, Rachel, tells another story. In the month after the funeral, as she dealt with grief and the discovery Sallie had sabotaged the family truth, Rachel shares what she knows to be true: There were three kids, not 13 – Martin was born in 1973. Sallie went to the nearest high school, not boarding school. She was not pregnant when she was 12. There was no Phillip.

In Sallie's narrative, her mother and stepfather are villains and her father a victim. When I ask her if Colin was violent, she replies: "Not compared to Mum." Sallie didn't go to her mother's funeral in 1999. She turned up for her father's in 2008. "I was always Daddy's girl," she told me.

Rachel defends their mother against her sister's accusations. "It is so unkind of her, because Mum did so much for all of us." When John was the breadwinner, she says, there wasn't food in the house. Rachel was only four when her parents separated – Sallie was six – but she suspects her father, a farm worker, spent his wages buying rounds at the pub and liked "looking like the big man". And then he left. John made no attempt to see his children. Not even a card for birthdays or Christmas.

Stepfather Colin was the hero of the story, Rachel says. "When we were living with Colin, there was always food on the table, there was always something for a birthday present, there was always a consistency of family." She says there is no way he ever would have or could have abused her sister.

Monday, September 21, 2015, Prince of Wales Hospital dialysis unit: Sallie pulls amusements from a backpack – pencils, puzzle books. She'll be here for some time. A nurse whispers about her poor attendance record. A technician hooks her to the machine. She's cranky. "Home away from home," she mutters. Her long hair is chaos. Her tracksuit pants hang low over a distended belly. A bangle on her wrist says: "I don't care – call the cops."

IN THE WINTER of 1988, Rachel Parker bumped into Sallie in Sydney. She was on a school excursion and was not pleased to see her sister. "I was embarrassed she was there," Rachel wrote in her teenage diary. "She was dressed like a sleazo. Fishnet stockings, packs of make-up. Yuck she hadn't changed."

By then, the family was living on a sheep farm near Crookwell, where Colin worked as a labourer. There, Sallie's childish selfishness evolved into something else. She'd fiddle with the truth, offering different versions of events to different people, and would let her siblings be punished for something she'd done. She was smoking. She fell pregnant when she was 15 – to a local boy, she told her sister. When Kerry and Colin found out, they carted her off to Sydney for an abortion.

Rachel, now 44 and a public servant in Wollongong, says Colin could not have been the father. "I've had a really long think about this, because of all the things you can say about another person, it's the worst thing. But also, by its very nature, and how hidden it is within society, it's not something I would dismiss out of hand." She says Colin would never have had the opportunity: he worked long hours, their mother had a keen sense that her children were her responsibility so never asked him to mind them, and the sisters shared a bedroom. And later, when Sallie gave birth to Anthony, she gave him two middle names – "John" and "Colin". If Colin had abused her, why would Sallie have given her son his name and, eventually, allow him to raise the child?

After the abortion, Sallie's wayward behaviour continued. Rumours circulated, including one that she'd been sprung in a school store-room with a boy. Sticky-beaking one day, Rachel found Sallie's diary. There was just one entry. "I f...ed Terry," it read. Terry* was a family friend. He was in his 40s.

A photo of Sallie from around that time shows a plain teenager. She has short hair, big teeth and unfashionable glasses. Rachel doesn't remember Sallie having many friends and thinks she might have been bullied. She thinks her sister's sexual explorations might have been an attempt to find acceptance.

At home, there were rows and tears. Colin and Kerry wanted Sallie to help with household chores and study hard – before she left school, she had been doing high-level maths and science. Sallie wanted to stay overnight at her boyfriend's. Rachel recalls one night when she and her siblings were watching a movie at a pub while their mother did some ironing for the publican. "Someone wanted to put on a blue movie and Mum said, 'No'. Sallie called her a 'slut'. "

There was other information in Rachel's teenage diary. "A note was sent home and Mum and Colin got it today," read the entry on October 27, 1986. "Sallie sat on the back seat of the bus drinking gin and cuddling Mark ... Mum got stuck into Sallie and she said, 'I don't f...ing care'. There was a big argument." Rachel wanted her sister to leave home: she wanted her own bedroom and the arguments to stop. In an email, she reflects on her own behaviour, as revealed in her diary: "I actually don't shine in this whole situation; I suspect I dobbed on her."

And then, on Saturday, November 1, 1986, she wrote: "I am helping her pack. She doesn't want to stay in this place as it is supposed to be worse than a gaol!" Sallie moved in with her boyfriend but the relationship didn't last. The drifting years that followed set the template for the future: by 1987, she was living with her maternal grandparents in Miranda in Sydney's south. Soon enough, though, she gravitated towards the city. Anthony was born in July 1990. Sallie did not put the father's name on his birth certificate.

When Anthony was about 11, a family member helped him call his mother. "The biggest question I asked was, did she remember my father?" says Anthony. He hadn't seen Sallie since he was about three, nor would he see or speak with her again. His mother gave him the name of a man she said was his father. Later, he discovered she had lied. The man was not his father. But Anthony has an equable character. "Getting angry doesn't get you anywhere," he says. Besides, he's had a father figure – Sallie's stepfather, Colin. The man he calls Grandpa. "He's a bit of a gruff old man, but I love him for it."

Thursday, November 26, 2015, St Vincent's Hospital dialysis unit: Gauguin is on the wall, Dick Van Dyke on the television. She's bored out of her tree. Lifts a soiled hospital gown to reveal a bruised gash in her belly and the new permacath. Back to normal, back to the machine. No one thought she'd survive this time. Some said she'd shot up into the permacath. She doesn't care what people think. She looks at her wedding ring. She remembers him.

NO ONE NOW will ever be able to tell the full truth of Sallie's story. Rachel only knows parts of it. An old boyfriend called Craig can't; he died of an overdose. "He was a goose," says Dave, who's not helpful with true stories, either. Sallie didn't tell him everything and, he says, she had a habit of exaggerating. Mark Mummery can't help, either. He was the love of her life, her husband, but he died of cancer in 2012.

"Too many deaths," says Sallie, who has been in St Vincent's for 10 days. She's picking at hospital food. The red jelly gets her attention. She's pleased to see I've brought her regular dialysis day treat: $4 sweet-and-sour pork from Discount Foods near Central Station.

Her body is stuffed. She has Hep C and a heart defect. She's had an aneurysm and golden staph. She started dialysis in 2012 after the polycystic kidney disease she inherited through her mother's line had wreaked its havoc. On November 16 at Wayside Chapel, she had a seizure. "Sal probably at the end – in ICU," pastor Graham Long messaged me. 

People were worried about you, I tell her. "Well, I've been dying for so long." She hasn't had any visitors except a Wayside worker who brought her slippers and a dressing gown, and Dave – "when he wants money".

I venture a question about life and regret. "I haven't regretted a lot of what I've done and I'll accept all of what I've done." She doesn't think about things she'd like to do before she dies. She still thinks about heroin. 

"I think of it when I first wake up and [it's] the last thing I think of before I go to bed." These days, she calls it "pain relief".

In the early 1990s, a boyfriend went out for speed and came back with something else. "It wasn't 'til it was in the fit and in my arm, that he told me he got heroin. Suddenly the drug gets more important than saving, more important than your job, more important than the rent."

By the time Anthony was born, Sallie likely was an addict. For a year or so she lived in a flat in Wollongong and Rachel would visit her. Garbage bags piled up, maggots attached. Neglected wet washing developed a certain pungency. Rachel remembers one meal Sallie gave Anthony – pasta with sugar on top. Another day, Sallie asked her sister to put her hair up. As Rachel brushed, she discovered a colony of nits and eggs. Then she heard from the woman who was minding Anthony: "I've had to shave his head, he's so full of lice," she said.

At some point, Sallie took her toddler to Sydney. Dave says they lived with Craig and an "old bloke" in a Camperdown "houso" tower for a while. "There were porn magazines and porn pictures everywhere." It's unclear where she was living when Anthony lit the fire that burnt down a flat but it's then that Sallie asked her mother to take Anthony for a few weeks. Rachel says the Department of Community Services was involved in the discussion. They had a thick file on Sallie which included reports that Anthony had been going to neighbours looking for food.

Rachel says the few weeks became years, and her sister made no attempt to retrieve Anthony. "There was no contact; we didn't know where she was." Sallie told me that the family made no attempt to get in touch with her. "Not once was I reported missing. Even after my mum had taken my son; it was like, 'We don't need her anymore'. " Dave remembers Sallie's firm view that her mother had stolen Anthony.

FOR A DECADE or so, Sallie's "home" was St Canice's Church in Darlinghurst, where she slept with a gang of others on the steps under the church's sandstone portico. Dave was her dealer, dishing up "breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper" – "that's what your habit is". In return, Sallie shared her earth-shaking snores and her warmth. "She was a big girl, our electric blanket."

With Sallie's polishing, the dirty, cold, hard, dull reality of life on the street acquires a sheen of almost cinematic glamour. She preferred bondage work, she told me – "f…-all sex involved" and it paid better. One client liked her to "massage" him with her stilettos and another wore a slave outfit and cleaned her kitchen with a toothbrush. But Sallie didn't have a kitchen for much of the time she was a working girl; it's more likely she was a street toiler. "Back to Forbes Street, back to work. More mugs, more money. Need breakfast in the morning," she wrote in a poem.

She told other stories: she told me she was a triplet and her triplet brother had undergone a sex change. "One of my six brothers is now my seventh sister." Peter became Peta. She told me about her sister Tracey, who was doing time for murder. Sallie did a year for being an accessory. Dave says she might have spent a night or two locked up for soliciting. Rachel confirms there is no sister Tracey or brother Peter.

There is clearly truth though, in the story of Mark Mummery. He started as Sallie's dealer. "And then I used to run for him," she says, pulling out a photo of a tattooed, bare-chested man with a strong jawline. "The way he treated me, it was like I was the only princess on the planet," she says. They got married in the registry office. I ask her how they celebrated. "We had a shot and went camping."

Wednesday, December 23, 2015, Sallie's apartment in inner-city Waterloo: There's a pet bowl on the floor holding desiccated cockroach carcasses. The smell is a punch in the nose. The passage across rubbish-strewn floors treacherous. The sink a foul tower of dishes. An Agatha Christie novel pokes from a pile – "Death in …" The sister starts to cry. The things she never knew they had in common. She loves Agatha Christie.

IT'S THE DAY after Sallie's funeral and Rachel's had bad news. Earlier, a police officer called to say that her brother, Martin, is dead. "All we've got here is that he died in his flat," the officer told her. Rachel is pale and wobbly when I meet her and Anthony outside Sallie's public housing block.

Sallie got the flat in about 2002. It's where she found some happiness with Mark. It's where she nursed him through his final days. It's where she hid out after his death, much of the time likely huddled on the bed blackened with dirt and covered in rubbish and cats. Here, nobody could see the ornery junkie cry. They couldn't see the wreckage as her hoarding escalated.

Dave tried to get her to do something about the mess – "I don't know how many f…ing times." He'd stay there sometimes but "I couldn't get a decent sleep; the fleas would drive me nuts."

Outside, mosquitoes are the enemy. Until they defeat us, Rachel, Anthony and I sit in the block's courtyard and talk about Martin. Rachel hadn't seen her brother for nearly 20 years. She only recently told someone that her New Year's resolution was to find him. Martin, she says, had gone from being a cheerful kid who liked animals to a reclusive adult. He'd studied for a while, something to do with agriculture, and lived with her for a few months. When he moved into his own flat, contact dried up.

She recalls her last conversation with him in early 1999 when their mother was in hospital. "I rang him and said, 'You've got to visit Mum, for your own peace of mind; we're not going to have her with us much longer.' " Kerry died that August. Martin visited her in hospital before her death but was not at the funeral.

Rachel last saw Sallie in October that year, two months after their mother's death. They met at a cafe in the city. Rachel's memory suggests it was a brief encounter. Sallie asked where Anthony was. "My response was, 'What do you care? You haven't been in contact with him for five years.' " She recalls Sallie did little more than shrug. Before they parted, Sallie asked her sister for $40 so she could stay at a shelter for the night. "I'm thinking, 'I can't give it to her, I know it's $40 for a hit of heroin, I just know that and I can't pay for her drugs.' "

In 2002, she wrote to Sallie, but heard nothing. She acknowledges that the letter may have criticised Sallie's neglect of Anthony. In early 2015, Rachel reached out again. This time, she wrote several versions before she was happy with her words. She told her sister that she'd be happy to meet for a chat. "But mostly, the letter said, 'Look, I hope you're happy and I want you to know I think of you regularly.' " There was no reply.

She's had time to think about why her family crumbled and can't help but place blame on her father, John, and his desertion. "It seems to me that he kind of opened the door to what family behaviour can be," she says. The family estrangement has had a profound effect on her own psyche. When her three girls quarrel – they're 10, 12 and 13 –  she often breaks down in tears. She tells them: "I worry this is going to carry on forever and when you grow up I'm going to lose you all and you're going to lose each other."

Rachel has talked to her girls about their aunt and, on the face of it, they seem to understand her story – they describe her as a lady "of negotiable affection", a term coined by writer Terry Pratchett. But it will be harder to explain to them what Rachel herself is grappling to understand in the midst of her labyrinthine grief: why her sister systematically created a false self.

She speculates that Sallie's motive was to make her life choices seem more acceptable. "If you say, 'I'm addicted to drugs because I was abused as a child, I grew up in poverty, I was one of 13 children, I wanted to numb the pain of my childhood,' you are a much more sympathetic character than someone who says, 'When I was a teenager I made some silly choices'. "

We are all constructs to one degree or another, says Graham Long. You build what you need to build to justify the path you're on. "Sal's path was set and it was always set towards, 'How do I get the next hit, how do I get a few dollars out of you?' " But Long would be the first to agree that nothing is straightforward. Sallie clearly mattered in some way to her Kings Cross community.

After her funeral, people clustered around Rachel to tell her how much they had loved her sister. She was flooded with jealousy. "I wish I had known her in that capacity where she inspired people."

She takes comfort in one thing: from the rubble of Sallie's flat, Anthony retrieved a box of photos. In it, he found a letter – Rachel's last letter to his mother. It had been folded and unfolded many times. It was clear that Sallie had read it over and over again. 

*Name has been changed.

Good Weekend